"All of us are capable of horrible evil," documentary filmmaker Errol Morris told assembled reporters during the second week of the 41st New York Film Festival. Program director Richard Peña probably could not have summed up thematic thrust of this year's collection any more succinctly. The tone had been set with "Mystic River" and "Dogville," and as expected, the NYFF's second week only expanded and deepened the concerns it had raised during the first half with more hard-hitting, no-nonsense movies.

Errol Morris' outstanding "The Fog of War" was a fitting centerpiece to a festival concerned with the nature of evil. The portrait of Johnson's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara could not be timelier. Set to the ominously hypnotizing score by Philip Glass, McNamara's career unfolds, beginning with his role as one of the architects of the WWII fire bombing of Japan. After the war, McNamara served a brief stint as head of Ford Motors before JFK tapped him for the Pentagon, where he orchestrated the Vietnam War.

Errol Morris slyly allows McNamara to portrait himself, and McNamara comes off as an affable uncle with a dark history, a man in search for himself. "We all make mistakes," he says. We should all be glad that our mistakes don't cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Asked about Donald Rumsfeld at the press conference following the screening, Errol Morris called the current Secretary of Defense a "McNamara manqué, a discount version, for better or worse." We can only hope that in addition to its special screenings of "The Battle of Algiers," the Pentagon will find time to watch "The Fog of War" for its crucial lessons about mixing good intentions with war.

The film, which will be released not a moment to soon on December 19th, expanded on the festival's themes by pointing out that even at the highest levels, responsibility is always passed on. Even Robert McNamara claims to have only followed LBJ's orders when he escalated the Vietnam war -- very much like the Cambodian prison guards in "S21" who declined to take responsibility for the atrocities they committed. Evil, the NYFF reminds us again and again, does not know itself.